This invention relates generally to power systems and more particularly to systems and methods for triggering a partial discharge (PD) acquisition from power systems.
PD analysis has been established as a useful diagnostic tool to assess high voltage insulation systems for integrity and design deficiencies. Interpretation of a PD pattern can reveal a source and/or an underlying cause for an occurrence of the PD pattern, and therefore, has been used as a condition monitoring and quality control tool by the manufacturing industry. Moreover, it is known to perform a PD analysis for high voltage electrical equipment and more particularly, for insulation systems encountered in high voltage rotating machinery. Typically, high voltage insulation is a heterogeneous composite including tape, mica flakes, and resin. As is known, no insulation system is homogeneously perfect and there is a statistical distribution of voids and other defects throughout known insulation systems. The void distribution results in a baseline level of PD activity for all insulation systems. An associated discharge of energy due to a defect in the insulation system is often a complicated and multi-faceted event studied from the PD pattern.
Users of the high voltage electrical equipment may incur extraordinary expenses when the equipment unexpectedly fails. An ability to predict failures of the equipment caused by defects in the insulation system enables an equipment user to utilize condition-based maintenance techniques to facilitate averting such unexpected failures and associated high costs. As such, within at least some known systems, the insulation system is monitored during operation of high voltage equipment to predict when a catastrophic defect will occur to avoid excessive damage, and to avoid unexpected and costly repair caused by the defect of the high voltage electrical equipment.
However, known automated monitoring systems of the insulation system may be impracticable because of PD data manipulation problems, such as, information overload caused by the partial discharge pattern. As such, identification of defective high voltage electrical equipment by using the PD analysis is generally not performed in an efficient and economic manner.